Share this story • • • Gaming on the Mac is terrible, right? That has been the consensus among gamers for a decade-plus—Ars even declared all the way back in 2007. But in reality, the situation has gotten better. And after Apple dedicated an unprecedented amount of attention to Mac gaming at, things might be looking up for Mac gamers in the coming years. When Apple announced and a at this year’s developer conference, there was an air of hope amongst Mac gamers and developers. Gaming on a Mac may look more appealing than ever thanks to the introduction and gradual improvement of Apple’s relatively new Metal graphics API and a better-than-ever-before install base.

The 10 Best Games for Mac in 2015 By Sherlock on January 14, 2015 No Comments It is widely perceived that gaming isn’t the Mac’s strongest point, but given its powerful hardware and powerful high definition displays, it would be nonsensical if you won’t put video games into its arsenal.

On top of that, discrete Mac graphics processors have just seen some of their biggest boosts in recent years, VR support is on the way, and external GPU enclosures promise previously impossible upgradeability. Tales of modern Mac gaming start here, in Tomb Raider II's version of Venice Decades in a niche In gamer communities on forums and Reddit, Mac gaming is often the subject of jokes and snarky comments.

Again, such snark was not always without justification. There just weren’t many good games on the Mac for years. Nevertheless, a few companies have continuously worked to fill the niche. Two in particular emerged as leaders in the marketplace—Aspyr Media and Feral Interactive.

Aspyr was founded way back in 1996, originally as a retail distributor. The porting aspect of its business came later, with the first game it ported in 1998—Eidos’. Feral got started in 1996, too. And in addition to the Mac, Feral has ported games to and iOS (it plans to expand to Android in the near future).

Further Reading “We’ve dealt firsthand with all the big changes to the platform that have taken place over the last two decades,” Edwin Smith, Feral’s head of production, told Ars. He cited changes like the advent of dedicated graphics processing units (GPUs), the move to a UNIX-based operating system, and the transition from the PowerPC processor architecture to Intel. PowerPC-based Macs in the '90s and early '00s used a different processing architecture from the Windows PCs for which most games were primarily developed. It didn’t help, either, that Microsoft’s Direct3D (part of the DirectX suite of APIs) became the industry standard graphics API. The cross-platform OpenGL API used in Apple computers struggled to keep up in the meantime.

And frankly back at that point in time, Macs weren’t very popular, so the audience was small. It was abundantly clear to gamers that the Mac was not a competitive platform in the PowerPC days.

Further Reading “In the years leading up to the transition to Intel CPUs in Macs, the porting process entailed converting games to run on PowerPC hardware,” said Smith. “This was difficult because the existing code was written with x86 architecture in mind, and since this didn’t always have a 1:1 relationship with how PowerPC architecture worked, we had some interesting problems to solve.” Climbing out into the sun Players using today’s Mac offerings live within a different landscape. Things became much rosier over the past decade for a number of reasons. First, there was the switch to Intel. By adopting the same architecture used in most Windows PCs, Apple moved the Mac out of a software engineering wasteland.

Free file converter download for mac. Second, Mac sales figures grew significantly at the same time. According to, 3.29 million Macs were sold globally in 2004. By 2015, that number had reached more than 20 million. “Apple today sells in a quarter what they used to sell in a year, so the total market opportunity has grown from what used to be normal,” Elizabeth Howard, vice-president for publishing at Aspyr, told Ars.

The hardware situation looked better, too. Macs enjoyed what Howard called a “halo effect” from the previous generation of consoles.

The Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 remained gaming hardware standards for nearly a decade—longer than many other console generations. That longevity allowed the Mac’s laptop-grade graphics hardware to catch up to this industry standard. Further Reading “Most video games are developed with console or PC as the lead platform, and the system requirements are naturally targeted around what those platforms can handle,” she explained. “Since Mac is a downstream port of these versions, and Macs were well-aligned with last-gen console specs, we were able to easily move games from PC and console over to Mac.” Finally, Howard and Smith cited the shift to digital distribution.